


Matching

by Beleriandings



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Earrings, Gen, Petty Theft, Sibling Bonding, a fun post-finale fieldtrip to wave echo cave, memory loss (and regaining), slight incidental blupjeans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 01:07:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12097377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: The story of a pair of really rad earrings. Taako shoplifts. Lup confronts her own (questionable) mortality. Barry's mostly just kinda there, honestly.





	Matching

“Eyyy! You got ‘em!”

“Course I did! Told you I could do it!” Taako grins, out of breath after running back, losing their pursuit. The two of them are not fully grown yet - and the merchant behind the stall had been a hulk of a man, with long legs - and the chase has been a near thing. Still, the twins may be young, but they’ve already run from a fair amount of situations in their lives. It’s kind of their Thing now, as Lup observed yesterday. Along with a bit of magic. On that front, Taako straightens up and grins, then coolly casts his mage hand again, snapping his spectral fingers in Lup’s face then booping her nose to underline his point, as obnoxiously as possible. He’s just learned how to cast the spell, and he’s proud of it. 

He’s even prouder of the earrings clutched tight in his other hand, the metal of their clasps biting into his fingers. 

Lup bats away his mage hand, then grabs at his real hand, trying to pry his grubby fingers open enthusiastically. “Let’s see then!”

The mage hand dissipates in the air, as Taako opens his fingers with a grin; there are two earrings, painted purple glittery beads hanging from small metal hoops. “Ta-da!”

“Whoa, _nice_!” The earrings are cheap and gaudy, but in that moment, they could be gold and diamonds. Lup grabs one, holding it up to her right ear and shaking her head; it catches in the twin shafts of sunlights filtering into their little forest clearing hideout, a safe distance away from the village market. “I look hella fancy, right bro?”

Taako grins, holding the other earring up to his own left ear. “Not as fancy as Taako!”

“Nah. Nah nah nah… dude, you _almost_ match up to me.”

“You wish.”

She elbows him. “We always have this argument, and you’re going to have to admit defeat one day.”

He elbows her back. “Nope. Absolutely not.” He contemplates his earring. “Wait. You know what we should do? These look so fucking dope, we should make them a Thing.”

“Huh?”

“We should wear them and match…” he wiggles his fingers in the air. “Forever. Or something.”

She snorted. “What, like friendship bracelets?”

“Nah. Like _rad twin earrings_.”

There was a short silence. Taako folded his arms, a little defensive. “If you think that’s dumb then I’ll just wear a _rad twin earring_ on my own, and you can go and… uh… look like garbage! And-”

She hushed him. “No, no… Taako, that is such a genius plan, because you know what?”

“What?”

“I was just about to say the exact same thing.”

“Bullshit. It was my idea. Don’t try and claim my genius as your own!”

She laughs, and they play with the earrings for a little while longer; they sparkle in a way that both twins delight in, even though they’re only painted wood. 

It’s Lup that hits first upon the problem. “Uh, Taako?”

“Yeah?”

“We can’t wear these.”

He frowns. “Why not? These are high fashion. And once we make it out there in the world, everyone will be wearing them! Gotta build the brand!”

“No, dummy.” She tugs his braid. “I know we look rad in them and everyone will want to look like us, but…” she sighs, looking at the earring in her hand. “We can’t wear them. We don’t have our ears pierced.”

“….Oh. Right. Well, we’ll just have to get on that then.” He turns in a circle, looking at the ground as though for inspiration. A moment later he grins, bending down and picking up a single pine needle from the ground, pulling out his wand. He laughs at Lup’s frankly concerned expression. “Lup… y’know how you’re all great at making flames and stuff… well…” he taps the pine needle with his wand and it transmutes to bright steel, and he smiles in satisfaction; he’s been practicing that spell. “Well, I just found this on the ground, so if we could have some fire on here…that would be great.”

Lup grins too then, a little flame already starting in her cupped hands. 

 

* * *

It’s a warm night and the stars arc overhead as Taako lies on his back in their campsite; he’s staring up into the clear night sky, halfway between meditation and full consciousness. He doesn’t need to sleep, not like the human and the dwarf that he’s been travelling with in the last few days do; he always _likes_ to sleep though, especially when travelling with Merle and Magnus. There’s simply a lot of _time_ to fill, waiting around while others sleep. He learned that on the road, travelling with other types of people too. 

But somehow, with these two… he feels safer, able to close his eyes in peace, though he can’t for the life of him understand why.

He’s not asleep now, though, and so he has time. He could spend it practicing his magic - he used to do that, he remembers - or he would read late into the night, a dog-eared spell-book he once stole from a travelling peddler, most of which he was too young and inexperienced to understand at the time. But the inky, faded spells had made him hungry to learn more, to become stronger. He also used to read his aunt’s recipes - their paper repaired as best he could with magic in the later years - over and over, until he knew them by heart. In the dark, would read fashion pamphlets and magazines and stare at the glossy printed pictures with longing in his eyes, hunger gnawing at his stomach as often as not, until his eyes itched and even his sensitive dark vision began to blur with tiredness.

Meditation, Taako has always opined, is boring and generally terrible. He’s not good at it; his life, as he has led it up to this point, has made him too twitchy, too liable to flinch back to full alertness. 

Sleep, on the other hand, he has decided he loves, defiantly and indulgently. Sleep - deep sleep, when one can dream - is an unnecessary luxury, and he, Taako, is _all_ about those. 

Tonight though, he’s not asleep, nor is he fully awake, but rather somewhere between. It’s certainly not the studied calm of meditation that he has to forcibly still his mind into. One of his arms is thrown back, over his head pillowed on the grass by his rolled up hat. (The hat will spring back into shape come morning; he is a magic boy, after all.)

His other hand tugs at the earring that hangs from his left earlobe, twisting it back and forth between his fingers. 

It’s a habit he has. The earring is the oldest thing he owns; he’s sold everything else, and certainly what little jewelery he had, a long time ago. 

But not this; for one thing, this bauble is too cheap and cracked to be worth anything much, the glittery purple paint beginning to flake off the carved wooden bead, the thin metal coating rubbing off and leaving a green stain on his skin. 

He has other earrings of course, all along the cartilage of his ears. There’s a lot of them, but less than there were before; he always loved how they glittered in the stage lights when he stood in front of an audience, but after Glamour Springs, he sold… well, a lot of what he owned, just to survive. He wanted to look different too, nearly took a knife to his hair but stopped himself at the last moment, couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. Instead he changed its colour with magic and braided it up under his hat as best he could, pulling it down low over his face, so he didn’t have to meet the eyes of passers by in the taverns and back alleys of Neverwinter as he slipped into hiding in the city’s underbelly.

He always kept this earring though, and there’s a reason; the reason is, he _doesn’t remember where it came from_. Or rather, he does - he stole it from a market stall when he was a kid, just starting out learning mage hand and marveling at its possibilities - but he doesn’t remember when he got the ear pierced for it. He remembered the other times he had pierced his ears - transmuting a pine needle into a steel needle and momentarily placing it in a flickering flame someone cupped in their hands and held out to him, from just out of sight - but he doesn’t remember that first time. He thinks about it sometimes; he knew the spell to make a needle then, knew that a heated needle would clean and cauterise the wound so it wouldn’t bleed so much. But he can’t for the life of him remember the moment itself. Someone, in all likelihood, did it for him. It must have _hurt_ too, but he can’t remember the pain. That in itself is odd; he usually remembers, when things hurt. That’s just the way he is. 

He tugs distractedly at the earring in the starry darkness, lying on his back in the clearing.He twists it between his fingers; it’s a little thing, but it bothers him.

There’s something else too; when he stole the earrings, he could have sworn they were a pair.

 _But surely_ , he thinks as he stares up into the sky, _there’s always been only one?_

* * *

Time has passed, and Taako remembers. Lup is back, and back in her body, now, and it’s the same, but different. It’s almost, she said to him once, like returning to her recorded state every year, a sensation that had always managed to be disorientating and just plain weird, however many times they had experienced it in their century-long journey. 

But, Lup explains, it’s even more than that. When Barry cloned her body, he had done the best he could to get it to the state that she had been in before, at least biologically. But something’s missing; something that caught the light at her ear, matching his own. 

“Taako” she says with wide eyes, very seriously and earnestly. She looks upset. “I… I _lost_ my rad twin earring.”

At first, he stares at her for a long time. Then, with a little frown but no words, he immediately goes to take out his own earring, the one he hasn’t taken out in… well, who knows how long. 

She places a hand on his, though, and he stops; maybe he knew all along that that wasn’t the solution to this. 

Luckily, if he’s learned anything in all this, it’s that there’s always another solution.

And that is how Taako finds himself walking once again through Wave Echo Cave, though admittedly it feels very different this time. Not least because he’s with Barry and Lup this time - Kravitz has given them the day off as a favour for Taako - instead of with Merle and Magnus. Not only because straight off the bat, Lup blasts the fungus that grows in this place with a handy, giant fireball, just so they can make jizz jokes about the place as loudly as they want. (“Huh, guess those didn’t go down so well with Cyrus Rockseeker, but then there’s no accounting for taste”, remarks Lup, leaving Taako and Barry to exchange a weary, slightly-horrified-but-mostly-resigned look).

Barry doesn’t have dark vision, so he’s conjured a flame, holding it in a cupped hand, the one that isn’t holding onto Lup’s. Progress through the cave is fast, now; they’re all of them different to how they were back then, but Taako’s learned so much since the first time he came here. His whole world has changed completely, in fact. 

Though, perhaps not everything has changed. They find Lup’s body - her old body - soon enough. It crumbled to ash when Taako took the Umbra Staff, but the crumpled, heavily mildewed remains of a red robe are still there. Taako feels his hand tighten reflexively on the KrEbStAr in one hand, and Lup’s hand - reassuringly solid and warm - in the other. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Barry tense on Lup’s other side and raise his handful of flame a little higher.

Lup, though; she steps forward confidently, leading them both by the hands behind her. As they stand over what’s left, she shakes her head, hair falling over her face as they see the slight outline of a fragment of a skull, some knuckle bones that didn’t quite crumble into dust. 

Taako feels a jolt of fear then, quick and irrational. he can’t see her face, as she looks down at her mortal remains. He feels a little nauseous suddenly; he’s never been too bothered by corpses, and lately his tolerance for spooky things has skyrocketed, given the people he spends most of his time with. But it’s not that; he realises, in this moment more than ever, just how _close_ he was then. He feels a renewed pang of grief and loss like a hook through his heart tearing open an old wound,even though Lup is standing right there beside him.

He peers her from under the brim of his hat, surreptitiously trying to figure out what she’s thinking. Some part of him - a fairly large part, if he’s honest - is still berating himself for not knowing sooner, for leaving her trapped and alone. For forgetting her even, though the gods knew that hadn’t been his fault. He grits his teeth. He has to say something. He is just opening his mouth to do so, when Lup raises her head, giving it a small shake as she looks up from her erstwhile grave, and says only two, deeply profound, words. 

“ _…_ Fucking _yikes_.”

A moment later, she’s dropping to her knees in a businesslike way, running her living hands through the dust. “Come on, don’t just stand there!” she singsongs. “This is what we came here for!”

And Taako and Barry exchange one more look, before they kneel down and join her, searching the shallower fissures in the caves floor, fanning out all around. There’s really not much else they can do.

In the end, it doesn’t actually take long. Soon enough the earring is found, somehow as bright and gaudy and tasteless as it was the day Taako stole them, back so long ago in that world that he now remembers as having a bright purple sky with two suns. 

As Lup dusts it off and puts it back on, Taako finds himself bursting into messy tears, as Barry stands there looking rather confused, but happy to see a smile on Lup’s face. He awkwardly pats Taako on the shoulder. “Um. There there?”

Taako regains his composure fast. “Barold, if anyone asks, I stayed cool through that.” He glares at Barry. “Capice, my dude?”

Barry laughs a little. “I’ll take the secret to the grave.”

“Thank - wait! _Nope_. Fool me once, maybe, but that joke’s not gonna work on me every single time -”

“Honestly? It probably is” interjects Lup affectionately, taking both their hands once more. She turns to the exit again, away from her old body. “Now, let’s get out of this jizz cave once and for all.”

Barry blinks in disbelief, glancing once more at the pile of ash and rotted red cloth, and suddenly Taako is assaulted by another memory; a spectral shape in a red robe floating before them in the cosmascope, back in Lucas’ laboratory. Barry’s voice, rising until it cracked, his lich form bursting into flames as the shocked, pain-ragged words came: _you found her?_

Barry looks doubtful now, squeezing Lup’s hand. “That’s… it? That’s all you wanted…?”

Lup smiles brilliantly, and nods, holding both of their hands tight. Her earring - the pair of Taako’s - dances from side to side, catching the light from Barry’s handful of flame. She smiles at Taako, and for a moment he’s transported back, all those years. So much has changed, and yet, somehow, everything that mattered has stayed the same. 

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I’ve got everything I need.”

And together the three of them walk back towards the light.


End file.
